Toward a Bioregional State

Launched to provide an information service connected with _Toward a Bioregional State, the book; the blog is the commentary, your questions and my answers, and news from around the world related to the issues of sustainability and unsustainability in a running muse on various issues of concern or inspiration.

THE LONG DURABLE AND UNCONTENTIOUS "BIOREGIONAL DEMOCRACY" ARTICLE, DELETED COMPLETELY, sometime in June 2006 from Wikifront:

It appears in many other locations around the web, drawn originally from the Wikipedia article and mirrored around.

Bioregional democracy: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Bioregional democracy (or the Bioregional State) is a set of electoral reforms designed to force the political process in a democracy to better represent concerns about the economy, the body, and environmental concerns (e.g., water quality), toward developmental paths that are locally prioritized and tailored to different areas for their own specific interests of sustainability and durability. This movement is variously called bioregional democracy, watershed cooperation, or bioregional representation, or one of various other similar names—all of which denote democratic control of a natural commons and local jurisdictional dominance in any economic developmental path decisions—while not removing more generalized civil rights protections of a larger national state.

The best known examples are the Great Lakes Commission of ten American states and the Canadian province of Ontario, which governs the largest fresh watershed in the world, and the cooperation by nations with Arctic Ocean boundaries. These are democratic entities cooperating in a international body, giving up some sovereignty by definition. This is the simplest form of bioregional democracy—cooperation to defend a single watershed.

But there are more profound forms that challenge many political assumptions.Contents

Ecoregions, as defined by the science of ecology, are the borders of ecologically-sensitive districts, and may often converge with the borders of indigenous lands and lifeways. Indigenous languages tend to include terms or distinctions applicable to one ecoregion, where that language has originated.

Supporters claim that ecoregional democracy can better preserve what remains of indigenous culture and indigenous language and lifeways, and permit new tribalists to live in better harmony with the land. Some even claim that this would in effect create new indigenous peoples.[edit]

Ecoregional consensus

Scientists claim that ecoregions are observed in nature rather than imposed by man. A natural border or keystone species or soil type or watershed or micro-climate reflects local natural capital constraints in that region leading to a homeorhic statis.

When a region is inhabited by man, indigenous or otherwise, this stasis can be extended by consensus, argue supporters of the Four Pillars, two of which are ecological wisdom and grassroots democracy.

The term "grassroots" itself invokes the metaphor of terrestrial ecoregions and implies that beings belong in a certain place in nature.

Two other Pillars, social justice and non-violence, are optimized by ecoregional borders because of the way that ecology itself imposes a certain type of natural equality and harms reduction between living species.[edit]

Ecoregions as habitats

The theory of Natural Capitalism, which developed in the mid to late 1990s, holds that the functioning natural ecology of a region is a form of living capital. Natural habitat performs services for all species including recirculation of air, water, replenishment of soil, prevention of erosion, and absorption of chemical, genetic, viral and bacterial threats.

In effect, any living being in an ecoregion has access to a commons from which it breathes, drinks, eats, and to which its wastes are disposed. Harms are reduced by the functioning ecology—as long as it is politically protected and is not required to provide more than its sustainable yield of resources. Ecoregional democracy proposes to protect that habitat by giving more political power to those living within it, less to outsiders.[edit]

Ecoregions as trade barriers

While tax, tariff and trade barriers have generally been reduced worldwide, advocates of ecoregional democracy seek trading bloc biosafety rules regarding ecologically-alien imports (such as genetically modified seeds or entirely new proteins or molecules) with ecoregions. This reduces the probability of spreading a major virus, prion, bacteria, genetically defective seed, or dangerous chemical agent across a bioregional border, if political borders (where imports are inspected and tariffs are applied) are perfectly aligned with them. Critics argue that this is an excuse for yet more regulations, and panic-mongering.

For example, the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) area roughly corresponds to the Nearctic ecological zone. A proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) would add the Neotropic ecological zone. Many groups in the anti-globalization movement demand more direct democratic control over the ecological, social, and trade rules in effect in such large trading blocs, fearing that ecology or society will be compromised. Critics argue that this is protectionism in disguise, and intended to protect an inefficient local agriculture from producers who grow the same foods abroad.[edit]

Ecoregions contain biological dangers to citizens

In addition to their convergence with indigenous people's lands and languages, and their natural reduction of threats to natural capital, ecoregional borders also naturally support biosecurity—by definition, water, soil and gene flows within terrestrial ecoregions do not endanger the natural capital of those regions as they are part of it.

However, culturally-imposed industrial age borders tend to bisect rather than follow ecoregions—proponents argue that this leads to conflict as ecological threats to a cut-off corner of an ecoregion do not threaten lives in the main body of the constituency. Whereas upstream and downstream citizens are dealing with the same leaders and legislatures by definition in an ecoregional constituency, and these conflicts remain contained locally.

Some argue that to permit political borders to bisect ecoregions is much like requiring a citizen to live in one place while requiring only his left arm to answer to the government of another. If ecologies reliably maintain homeorhic balance in themselves, this is a valid way to view the problem—and a major opportunity to cut conflicts by better aligning political to ecological borders, taking "body parts" out of politically defined conflict. This topic is addressed at some length and elaboration with examples in Toward a Bioregional State.

If biological warfare or ecological pathways for biohazards become a major concern in national governance, even national electoral reform seems likely to adhere to these ecoregional borders to minimize costs of implementing a robust, fair and defensive biosecurity protocol.[edit]

Ecoregions as Political Feedback Against Unsustainable Developmentalism

Particularly within the frameworks of proposals in the Bioregional State, ecoregions or watersheds aid in faciliation of the innate "ecological self-interest" of people to avoid externalities in human health, ecology, or economic relations that are impressed upon people living in a particular ecological area by informal politics guided from larger state frameworks. One way to bring this type of ecological self-interest in sync with developmental policies would be to make watersheds/ecoregions as the mandated form for electoral dictricting, providing ecological based checks and balances in politics. This brings ecological self-interest in sync with state politics instead of out of sync with it. A watershed based electoral districting provides feedback against unsustainable developmentalism policies in particular areas; provides for a more competitive informal party framework that removes the gerrymandered and uncompetitive districting that is key to how informal gatekeeping is involved in maintaining unsustainable development; as well provides an ongoing formal mechanism for particular areas to participate in deliberations of developmental decisions within larger state levels for their own ecologically specific sustainable paths. The wider argument of the Bioregional State is that much of unsustainable developmentalism comes from how exclusionary and undemocratic political gatekeeping is organized and maintained in ostensibly "formal democracies." The wider argument of the Bioregional State is that its frameworks are an improvement on democracy in general, that removes many different levels of elitist, exclusionary political gatekeeping which promotes unsustainable abuses. Watersheds as electoral districts are only one of the more "charismatic" examples in the Bioregional State for how to operationalize an ecological check and balance solution on the level of districting, in this wider general issue of gatekeeping.[edit]

Language and biodiversity

A compelling but controversial argument for more bioregional democracy is the alignment of natural language and ecological stewardship illustrated by anthropological linguistics.

David Nettle, in "Linguistic Diversity," 1998, notes "the amazing fact that the map of language density in the world is the same as the map of species diversity: i.e., where there are more species per unit of area, there will be more languages too." According to the proponents of this theory, Grassroots Democracy organized by ecoregions seems to be one way to preserve biodiversity.

This prompts support from indigenous peoples, ecologists, new tribalists and Green Parties and Gaians, who tend to believe that indigenous customs, constraints, language or even local jargon reflects the natural ecology, and so local cultural sovereignty is critical to maintaining biodiversity. This is a common topic of study amongst academic linguists, e.g., Mark Fettes, who in "Steps Towards an Ecology of Language," 1996, seeks "a theory of language ecology which can integrate naturalist and critical traditions" and "An Ecological Approach to Language Renewal," 1997. Critics argue that languages tied to ecology or specific lifeways are irrelevant in an age of global communications—some claim that everyone should learn English to avoid disadvantage in the global economy.[edit]

The Bioregional Revolutionary Movement

The Bioregional Revolution movement is a new organization (circa 2004) promoting bioregionalism, permaculture, local currencies, and nonviolence in response to "peak oil" and other converging problems they claim we are likely to see in the 21st century.

Associated with this movement is RANS (Revolutionary Army for Nonviolence and Sustainability) which advocates the organization of autonomous individuals committed to the principles of nuturing the earth and humanity in order to create a sustainable and nonviolent future.[edit]

I'm only archiving, because Wikipedia had adopted Orwellian "history rewrite" (seriously) functions that delete even the (e-)paper trail of deletions. Poof. It "never existed." Or did it? Winston Smith would be facinated how much Wikipedia has come to resemble the Ministry of Truth. And it is very appropriate I quote "Wikipedia" itself on this, because the description of the Orwellian disinformation program fits much of what Wikipedia stands for:

The Ministry of Truth (or Minitrue, in Newspeak) was one of the four ministries that govern Airstrip One, Oceania in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The other Ministries were: Ministry of Love, Ministry of Plenty, and Ministry of Peace. The Ministry of Truth was where the main character, Winston Smith, works. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete 300m into the air, containing over 3000 rooms above ground. On the outside wall were the three slogans of the Party: "War is Peace," "Freedom is Slavery," "Ignorance is Strength." The Ministry of Truth was involved with news, entertainment and the fine arts. Its purpose was to rewrite history and change the facts to fit party doctrine. For example, if Big Brother (BB) made a prediction that turned out to be wrong, the employees of the Ministry of Truth would go back and rewrite history so that any prediction BB made would be accurate. As with the other Ministries in the novel, the Ministry of Truth actually did the opposite of what its name implies, being responsible for the falsification of historical events.

Substitute in Wikipedia for Ministry of Truth and Jimbo Wales as Big Brother, and you have a live version of the Orwellian nightmare, masquerading as a "truth website".

Particularly crucial here is the key "Ignorance is Strength" motto of both the Ministry of Truth, and, increasingly, Wikipedia.

Would anyone of even basic intelligence trust a hypocritically self-proclaimed "encyclopedia" that allow Orwellian rewrites? By people who admit they have zero knowledge of the articles at hand, and actually seem to be promoted because of their ignorance? "Ignorance is Strength" I guess in action at Wikipedia.

As others have noticed, at Wikitruth.info as well as the Village Voice, more purging goes on at Wikipedia than writing--another classic characteristic of a Ministry of Truth.

How did it get this way?

More to the point was it meant to be that way all along? The open Internet is innately dangerous to those who would prefer to substitute it for a "singular authoritative Internet text", from one viewpoint with the rest becoming thoughtcrime. Similar to Wikipedia,...

In George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four the government attempts to control not only the speech and actions, but also the thoughts of its subjects, labeling unapproved thoughts with the term thoughtcrime or, in Newspeak, "crimethink". In the book, Winston Smith, the main character, writes in his diary: Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death. He also makes remarks to the effect that "Thoughtcrime is the only crime that matters." The Thought Police (thinkpol in Newspeak) was the secret police of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four whose job it was to uncover and punish thoughtcrime. The Thought Police used psychology and omnipresent surveillance to find and eliminate members of society who were capable of the mere thought of challenging ruling authority. Orwell's Thought Police and their pursuit of thoughtcrime was based on the methods used by the totalitarian states and competing ideologies of the 20th century. It also had much to do with Orwell's own "power of facing unpleasant facts", as he called it, and his willingness to criticise prevailing ideas which brought him into conflict with others and their "smelly little orthodoxies". ... The term "Thought Police", by extension, has come to refer to real or perceived enforcement of ideological correctness in any modern or historical contexts.

Wikipedia as the Modern Day Thought Police

It's very amusing how that is a perfect definition of Wikipedia in practice. To whit, a bit about my experience with observing and participating in the project for a while:

First however, I admit I always had my suspicions about the Wikipedia high powered free media advertizing that it got. There was always something rather suspicious to me that Skull and Bones founded (Time Magazine) and Project Mockingbird based U.S. corporate media (Time Magazine, Washington Post, etc.) were suddenly so concerned with hypeing an unknown named Jimbo Wales and presenting him--actually, foisting him as--some kind of leader of a free speech movement of the democratization of knowledge.

By giving Jimbo's Wikifront free facelift attention as an "independent" non-profit online encyclopedia, they deluded lots of honest souls out there to work for the Ministry of Truth without their own knowledge: to do much of the Ministry's intellectual work, to donate funds for its operation out of their own labor, and to provide the je ne sais quoi democratic element that only those who really believed in the project could provide--even though they were truly on the outside of the administration of the project which is a different matter.

While noble Wikifront content providers slaved away, and spent hours of their lives adding commas and fixing verb tense changes, the overlords higher in the white limestone pyramid of the Ministry of Truth get to sit back and mostly work by deletions: paring down others work to a single politically skewed viewpoint which is always easier to achieve via calculated delition than the work of including information themselves.

It yields the aura of democracy to see countless millions laboring on articles--collectively clueless as to who runs the project though they may think that their outside particiption in it provides some sort of "stake" of sorts in defending it. However, on the other hand, Wikifront yields the aura of a front operation since few of the people actually running and editing the show believe in it (see the Wikitruth.info website) or write articles themselves, or have any knowledge that can be charitably described as empirical instead of ideologically driven. (By the way, two articles that interested me to see "dispassionate" reviews of were Skull and Bones and Project Mockingbird, which quickly were deleted without explanation or heavily trashed. This was hardly lost on me as to the "real purpose" of Wikifront: whole swaths of highly documented information I remember reading simply soon "didn't exist" anymore once I came back to see what had been added by others--or removed, as the case may be.)

And surely Time and Washington Post, the balder side of the U.S.'s Orwellian Ministry of Truth, could have told everyone that their annointing of Jimbo Wales as a democratic truth leader, with only cursory research, that he could quickly be questioned as to his "overly premature" credentials as a democratic leader when his whole life has only been spent as a stock market futures trader or a pornographer connected with something called Bomis.

I beg the question, your Honor: how many pornographers/stock brokers do you know who just "out of the blue" set up an encyclopedia, and devote their lives to it, or rather devote their lives to endlessly deleting it and fundraising and somehow getting themselves free media "annointing" attention that is wholly false and dishonest?

On the surface St. Jimbo sounds like a conversion worthy of Roman Catholic sainthood. On the other hand, I contest that perhaps the project was handed to Jimbo to work on from someone else, to provide layers of protection. After all with Jimbo's Ayn Rand cult like connections to Objectivism, stock markets, and pornography, he would fit right in ideologically with the rest of the neocon crew. I would contend that the whole Wikifront is a large "non-profit" humorously public self-subsidized psychological operation which wastes the time, labor, and funds from millions of people--to subsidize their own Ministry of Truth which is only interested in tightening the screw further by controlling instead of freeing information, all done under the guise of democratic legitimacy.

It only clenched my suspicions of a "Wikifront" operation when I began to notice a cherrypicking culture of political bias in many "editors" who suspiciously had been "elevated" to cardinal (editorial) rank who came across as Ayd Randite priests--who were actually prideful that they were without any real knowledge to their name or specializations of what they "edited" with gusto for "accuracy." It seemed a very shallow cover desire to crack digital heads.

Some of these Ministry of Truthers seemingly spend a huge chunk of their lives at Wikifront, some of them growing exceptionally fat from their pictures, systematically purging without ever adding anything--as their own digital trail shows. See for yourself: follow a few cardinal class "editors" around like Big Brother yourself since you can literally track people throughout the whole Wikifront project down to the addition of a hyphen here or a sentence remove there--as they most assuredly they do you. The Wikifront "panopticon thoughtcrime" culture is fascinating to watch, and rather easy to follow the actions of an cardinal editor or "Big Brother" Ayn Randite Jimbo Wales himself as they go about their undoing "work" (sometimes freezing articles so no one can change the official "revealed truth"; sometimes wholesale deleting of articles on politically sensitive points. You can even oogle their recorded conversations with each other where they give mostly bizarre emotional "justifications" for their actions, instead of empirical justifications.

I only got interested in this "spy versus spy" quality of Wikipedia when two particular editors sicced themselves on me, and posted what were threatening comments to me personally on my home page there. "Who are these frantic viscious editorial people? The one's that claim no basic knowledge of what they are assigning themselves to edit?" I thought. "What could be their motivation for being so frantic, except ideological misconceptions that are coming unravelled by the internet itself?" If you start a democratic encyclopedia, and its just a front operation, sooner or later you are only going to find yourself superceded and found out.

Though it was definitely an encyclopedia documentation project from my point of view. However, from their point of view, unless it fit with their "smelly little orthodoxies" in classic Orwellian style, it was into the memory hole.

The memory hole, as in the phrase "Going down the memory hole," refers to George Orwell's novel, 1984. In the novel, the memory hole is a slot into which government officials deposit politically inconvenient documents and records for destruction. 1984's protagonist Winston Smith, who works in the Ministry of Truth, is routinely assigned the task of revising old newspaper articles in order to serve the propaganda interests of the government. For example, if the government had pledged that the chocolate ration would not fall below the current 30 grams per week, but in fact the ration is reduced to 20 grams per week, the historical record (e.g. an article from a back issue of the Times newspaper) is revised to contain an announcement that a reduction to 20 grams might soon prove necessary, and later even said that the amount is raised to this amount. The original copies of that historical record are deposited into the memory hole. The term now generally refers to the alteration or outright disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts, or other records, such as from a web site or other archive.

--or such as from Wikipedia.

One cardinal class editor was very partial (in the true sense of the word) to only purging information from articles about the Bush Administration and its appointees. When I called attention to this to other editors and asked it to be investigated, no one ever got back to me. They were probabaly busy doing the same thing specializing in another area. I hardly think all editors there are likely this, only the important ones.

When I found out through Wikitruth.info that Jimbo Wales originally was a pornographer, it clenched it for me that it was a front operation. To hypothesize, it perhaps connects his networks with the whole back-end of the CIA protected drug trades (or here) in the United States). It occurred to me that since it is a small world at the corrupt top of the U.S. political pyramid, involved with everything from nationally orchestrated pedophila and snuff films [12] simultaneous to being the head political elites and vote fraud protectors [12] of the United States, he may have been handed this front operation to work with in some sense.

The bizarre free media attention to Wikipedia--by the very media organizations that guard their editorial privildges for deciding what to show or hide to the U.S. mediasphere--seemed very telling to me that the whole Wikifront was exactly that. They were following their own intersts still for media control, in an adapted and cloaked form. In other words, Wikipedia was nothing of the sort from the beginning it seems.

So, in the interests of a real Wikipedia, one where the Church of Jimbo Wales (or whomever he might really work for) is removed from theocratic control, I post my archived copy of "bioregional democracy."

I would have liked to have listed here for the record all the other nice people who aided in a truly collective and enlightening group project. The article "bioregional democracy" already existed long before I found it by random searching and cross linking. I added some sections to it, and organized the pieces of the definition of bioregional democracy from all their pieces of information that stood the editoral test of time. However, it was a truly a collective endeavor, something I enjoy.

However, Wikifront tells me now that that information "never existed", since they purged it down the memory hole. However, we did craft it over the space of a year. That was how Wikipedia tells us it is meant to work. And it does and did work when they let it. We were very civil and learned much from each other there. However, Wikifront soon overshadowed our small scale process, and with a wholesale purge all of the above information is gone from Wikifront down the memory hole. The post has been "comfortably lobotomized," down to one paragraph, without links for exploring more, and records of its connection to democracy "never existed"--so they say.

However it did and still does: bioregionalism and environmental politics always has had a connection to democracy.

In conclusion, it is Wikipedia that never never existed in my opinion, and it continues to not exist. It was a collective fantasy in our minds, placed there by the corporate media itself, which only reveals its real purpose whenever "Ignorance is Strength" slash and burners tear through. The Wikifront is operated less in the interest of editoral objectivity and more as per the church of Jimbo Wales in the interests of protecting Ayn Rand's Objectivism and George Bush related articles--which is a wholly different thing.

Go to Wikitruth.info and the links above for a look under the hood of what has been going on since day one at Wikipedia, and see if you unavoidably come to the same conclusions.

That such a Sisyphean police state endeavor as Wikifront could ever be dreamed up, shows we may be at "stage three" on the Ghandi social movement scale--which makes me optimistic in some sense.

The Ghandi quote: "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."

There's only one change to the definition I would air, in italic:

Bioregional democracy (or the Bioregional State) is a set of electoral reforms and commodity reforms designed to force the political process in a democracy to better represent concerns about the economy, the body, and environmental concerns (e.g., water quality), toward developmental paths that are locally prioritized and tailored to different areas for their own specific interests of sustainability and durability. This movement is variously called bioregional democracy, watershed cooperation, or bioregional representation, or one of various other similar names—all of which denote democratic control of a natural commons and local jurisdictional dominance in any economic developmental path decisions—while not removing more generalized civil rights protections of a larger national state.

Sunday, July 16, 2006

"Brave New Organic World"? Greenwashed Corporate Factory Farms and Factory Forests, or Something Different in the Offing?

Several events recently are discussed below, all related to the ongoing story of the perversity of the U.S. agricultural corporate monolith. One aspect is the U.S. consumer's internationalization of its sourcing for organic food. The story is spun that producers "can't keep up." However, the story is they "don't want to keep up."

They've had years to adapt. They simply refuse. You should look to understanding why, instead of expecting them to listen. The suggestion still is to adopt different more political institutional strategies of watershed specific user/producer relationships than intermittent boycotts. The latter expects that their captive markets alone are going to help you. The former helps you to help yourselves on the local level to maintain sustainability.

Furthermore, instead of adapting to the expanding organic consumer desires, they want to have authorized the first GM-tree, the GM-plum tree, "C5". Ominous sounding "C5" is the first ever temperate climate GM-tree that has made it this far to be released, even though it claims to "solve" things which are without a problem and will generate well known difficulties for all. You can still contact the USDA about that, at the link. Deadline for comments is July 17th, 2006:

"The US Department of Agriculture is accepting public comments between now and July 17, 2006 on a petition that would allow commercial growing and marketing of the first genetically engineered (GE) plum trees. If approved, this would remove all regulatory oversight of this GE variety, a virus-resistant plum tree known as the Honey Sweet Pox Potyvirus Resistant plum. This would open the door to GE varieties of many other related stone fruits, such as peaches, apricots, cherries and almonds, that are susceptible to the same virus. Ironically, this virus is not even found in the US today according to the USDA, and is certainly not a significant agricultural problem here.

"The USDA admits that this GE plum will contaminate both organic and conventional non-genetically engineered plum orchards if it is approved. Since all commercial plum trees are cultivars that are relatively cross compatible within the same species, Prunus domestica, contamination via GE plum pollen carried by bees and other insects will infiltrate the plum orchards of organic and conventional growers. The proposed buffer zones between GE plums and other plums will not prevent genetic contamination from being spread by pollinating insects.

"Because this GE plum tree is also the first genetically engineered temperate tree proposed for commercial planting, it also opens the door to the commercialization of GE varieties of other temperate trees such as poplars, pines, and walnuts.

"The one GE fruit tree that has previously been approved, a virus resistant Hawaiian papaya, has caused extensive contamination of organic, conventional and wild papaya orchards on most of the Hawaiian Islands in just a few years. This contamination has spread far more quickly than the USDA predicted in its initial assessment.Once native and cultivated plum varieties are contaminated with transgenic pollen [and thus owned by the genetic buccaneers who will take you to court over pollen drift damage caused by them, for "using their trees"--shades of Percy Smelcher once more, can you see it?], there is no calling it back. [So they will simply start jailing organic growers instead.]

"This petition has implications for all other GE tree species, as the USDA and the industry want to gauge what the public's reaction will be. It is critical that all concerned about the threat of GE foods and GE trees respond to this USDA petition.

[Comments to submit below. Please add any additional comments of your own.]The following comments are in reference to Docket No. APHIS-2006-0084 [*]

This direction, plus claims made through more GM tinkering of a "non-contaminate pollen" from GM "terminator style" plants, basically is a recipie for a "clean factory GM tree farm" monocrop, with drastic reduction in biological diversity security in the offing after that assuredly.

"Researchers in Wageningen have developed a new method in which a genetically modified plant destroys its transgenes once it has manufactured its pollen. This makes it possible to avoid the spread of transgenes, and to use plants as molecular factories in a cleaner way. Nap does not think that the development will silence criticism from organisations such as Greenpeace. 'It is a very 'clean' process by which the transgenes are removed, but there still are 22 base pairs left over. This is not enough for a plant to manufacture transgenic proteins, but if activists are looking for a target, they will find one in this. After all, it's still genetic modification.'" [*]

Consumers worldwide fail to want factory GM-farms, or factory GM-forests either. Recently an anti-GMO fair was held in 40 countries worldwide, simultaneously on April 6, 2006, in conjunction with the First World Action Day Against GMOs. Celebrated in 40 countries, the food fair offered a sampling of mostly organic and traditional agricultural alternatives for producers and consumers in all those different localities. [*]

All this shows large food producers are your active enemies. They even admit it. Some quotes from a previous post may help it sink in:

"...Agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland, which bills itself as "supermarket to the world," had its wholesome image tarnished in 1998 when a federal trial in Chicago found two of its top executives guilty of fixing prices with the firm's competitors; each got two years in prison. The FBI informant who put them there, Mark Whitacre, former president of ADM's bioproducts division, secretly made audio and video tapes of ADM meetings. According to Whitacre, ADM's bizarre unofficial motto was: "The competitor is our friend and the customer is our enemy." What occurred only several years later in 2001 is merely par for the course. It seems that Monsanto attempted to "hijack" Italy. 'Genetic buccaneering' as a theme here reminded me of a 2001 article below concerning the corporate raiding attempt to "contaminate Italy" with GMOs. Italy has banned all GMOs. However, once you pollute a country, it feasibly would be 'open'. After all, remember "the consumer is the enemy" according to their supply-sided mindset. Monsanto representatives on the illegal Italian shipment of their GMOs there: "It is not accidental. It is normal." Another Monsanto quote: "Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA's job.'' Phil Angell, Monsanto's Director of Corporate Communications, New York Times 10/25/98 [*]

"[A] secret Monsanto study shows unquestionable health effects as a result of rats being fed genetically modified food. The study if fully released could vindicate an earlier study by a Dr Pusztai who's career was a effectively destroyed by an orchestrated plan to discredit Dr Pusztai hatched in British Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet...Rats fed on a diet rich in genetically modified corn developed abnormalities to internal organs and changes to their blood, raising fears that human health could be affected by eating GM food. The Independent on Sunday can today reveal details of secret research carried out by Monsanto, the GM food giant, which shows that rats fed the modified corn had smaller kidneys and variations in the composition of their blood. According to the confidential 1,139-page report, these health problems were absent from another batch of rodents fed non-GM food as part of the research project." [*]

If they are this psychopathic about what they are pumping into you, you should learn to act as if they are you enemy in self-defense--because they are treating you as the enemy. They admit it themselves.

So, in this continuing story about the perverse and even sadistic organization of U.S. corporate agriculture, one theme is typically left unsaid: the ongoing rejection of U.S. corporate agriculture to listen to its consumers in the first place--whether they want sourced organics or otherwise. So why do people still think a temporary boycott is the answer? Completely different watershed user/producer arrangements would be a more permanent answer.

This story fits well with the contentious supply versus demand dynamic replaying across several posts, whether plant or animal, U.S. agriculture attempts to demote or even legally outflank consumer desires. The purpose is to assure that their supply-side 'consumer management' frameworks are unchallenged instead of the consumer satisfied.

Data below shows that U.S. consumers are literally "climbing the walls" attempting to get organic food, to get out of a corporate monolithic poison factory. Though while sourcing it from closer to home would be much cheaper and would be a source of secure and instant profit, few corporations make that route available to U.S. consumers--or make it available to themselves as producers--by conscious strategic choice.

Instead of building ladders to aid the consumer to scale these walls, and to arrange these organic user/producer relationships, large corporate interests are kicking the ladders off the wall by either practicing "market denial" (a form of triage, hoping for the issue to go away), or they are practicing active repressive legal action against those attempting to aid the consumer, as has historically been seen with the aspartame issue or the desire to test for organic meat getting state repression.

Dean Foods/Horizon is the U.S.'s largest corporate organic dairy operation. It started to institute scaled feed lots. However, their consumers organized a boycott, perhaps the first boycott seen in which the aim is agricultural reconstruction instead of simply individual organic health concerns. However, both these issues come full circle because consumers are getting more interested in supporting only certain styles of agricultural organization as much as organic standards because they understand the relationship.

"A nationwide boycott has begun....One month ago, after a poll of our members, the Organic Consumers Association called on consumers to boycott dairy companies like Horizon and Aurora for their practice of raising "organic" cattle on intensive confinement feedlots. Alberta Coop took Horizon products off the shelves about a year ago. A number of natural food stores and co-ops across the U.S. are also beginning to respond to concerned consumers and removing suspect dairy products from their stores. The Wedge Co-op in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the second largest co-op in the U.S., no longer carries Horizon products. In Colorado, the Boulder Co-op Market, has also discontinued stocking Horizon products. Amy Wyatt, Assistant General Manager for the Co-op, says, "Based on our concerns regarding Horizon's practices, we didn't feel that continuing to carry this company's products was consistent with our mission and values." Dean Foods, Horizon's parent company, is also starting to come under fire for abandoning U.S. organic soybean farmers and importing cheap soybeans from China, where organic standards are dubious, and farm labor wages and conditions are abysmal." [*]

The local watershed jurisdictional priority of the bioregional state definitely fits with the whole motif of this increasing desire to go beyond "organic standards" to "local organic" standards. And consumers are fighting for it because they see the relationships between local and organic--instead of simply organic--are required for actual sustainabilty--when "Brave New Organic World" groups like Dean/Horizon could feasibly have a factory cow organic farm, could source internationally their own "organic" feed for the cattle from dubious locations that are far away an unmonitorable by the local consumer. Moreover, we could feasily have the "clean dystopia" of a "clean GM-forest"--that would still destroy ecological diversity and promote monocrop and economic shakeout and destruction of small scale business practices.

There is a consumer and small scale producer politics out there is that only waiting to be organized on the local level. Simply organizing economically with temporary boycotts--without additional institutions to support and create the world or consumer relationships you want--will always play in the hands of the unsustainable interests once the boycott peters off, and the same institutional factors take up their supply versus demand interests with renewed vigor.

One solution to this is the user/producer institution mentioned previously. It would be an ONGOING check and balance against "rogue producer" attitudes that shorn themselves from local consumer concerns which turn cannibal in attitudes toward those that support them, instead of depending on boycotts. The expanding desire to turn organic standards into "local organic" standards would be benefited by such a user/producer institution.

Playing devil's advocate for a moment, surely this political issue of self-interest is just the same that watersheds would perform in the bioregional state? Yes, it is. However, in the bioregional state, these decisions would be taken locally, democratically, and collectively for public interests of health, local ecological durability, and local economic sustainability, instead of in all the examples above, taken for private, secretive, and collusionary interests against consumers and the public and with only one long term goal: expanding unsustainable behavior directly by removing consumer choices or by indirectly doing so by subsidizing degraders--which market-warps sustainable and small operations out of economic durability despite the fact that the latter is what the consumers want!

Thus, in the bioregional state, the question of consumer (economic-only instead of full political autarky) watershed autarky comes up--as it should--since those locally should have priority over tailoring their local watershed economy to their benefit. With the bioregional state's watershed user/producer institutions, instead of having oneself externally manipulated by another's private attempts to buccaneer and foist something on you or into you that you dislike, or being forced to purchase something because private groups have been successful in removing other choices leaving them the master of (agricultural) field over the captive consumers, one would have an institutional venue of user/producer locality to fulfill ones local and organic concerns simultaneously.

It is much cheaper for a large consolidated organic corporations, as Dean Foods/Horizon is doing, to turn their organic feed lots into a "organic brave new world" of organic factory farms, which will most certainly lead once more to antibiotic-laden factory farms. A "sun-shiny" organic factory farm is certainly a biological contradiction in terms since it is going to set up a context of increasing cattle crowd diseases which will lead to illegal antibiotics used on the side (of the cow), and then into the mouth of the consumer. Consumers called a boycott.

Circling back to the bioregional state motif, it should be clear that only when the formal political frameworks change in an ongoing way, will consumers and their local user/producer local economic desires have fuller public input into deciding what they want locally, instead of what someone else wants to feed them who lives far off.

Additional local institutions are required to reflect and bring out these desires. As has been mentioned in other posts, user/producer watershed institutions should be institutionalized instead of expecting economic exchange alone as something to bring anyone to sustainability.

In conclusion, it seems that the chemical-laden and hugely consolidated agriculture of the U.S. is ignoring its self-proclaimed god of "market forces." It always has, if you follow the history of its consolidation which has had more to do with political cronyism that market response.

The caveat is that I see nothing the matter with international trade in organics per se, as long as it is decided on by the local watershed themselves and avoids generating externalities in the location in question. For instance, in the Vermont case, I will let someone who is personally touched by this booming internationalization of organics speak on that:

The issue causes mixed feelings for Travis Forgues, an organic dairy farmer in Vermont. "I don't like the idea of it coming in from out of this country, but I don't want them to stop growing organic because of that," Forgues said. "I want people to say, `Let's do that here, give a farmer another avenue to make a livable wage.'"

Published on Friday, July 7, 2006 by the Associated PressDemand for Organic Food Outstrips Supplyby Libby Quaid

America's appetite for organic food is [gosh darn it!] so strong that supply just can't keep up with demand. [though consumers can keep up with the spin...] Organic products still have only a tiny slice, about 2.5 percent, of the nation's food market. But the slice is expanding at a feverish pace.

Growth in sales of organic food has been 15 percent to 21 percent each year, compared with 2 percent to 4 percent for total food sales.

Mainstream supermarkets, eyeing the success of organic retailers such as Whole Foods, have rushed to meet demand. The Kroger Co., Safeway Inc. and SuperValu Inc., which owns Albertson's LLC, are among those selling their own organic brands.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said earlier this year it would double its organic offerings.

The number of organic farms--an estimated 10,000--is also increasing, but not fast enough. As a result, organic manufacturers are looking for ingredients outside the United States in places like Europe, Bolivia, Venezuela and South Africa.

That is no surprise, said Barbara Robinson, head of the Agriculture Department's National Organic Program. The program provides the round, green "USDA Organic" seal for certified products.

Her agency is just now starting to track organic data, but Robinson believes the United States is importing far more organic food than it exports. That's true of conventional food, too.

"That is how you stimulate growth, is imports generally," she said. "Your own industry says we're tired of importing this; why should I pay for imports when I could start producing myself?"

"We're doing a lot of scrambling," said Sheryl O'Loughlin, CEO of Clif Bar Inc. "We have gotten to the point now where we know we can get a call for any ingredient."

The makers of the high-energy, eat-and-run Clif Bar needed 85,000 pounds of almonds, and they had to be organic. But the nation's organic almond crop was spoken for. Eventually, Clif Bar found the almonds — in Spain. But more shortages have popped up: apricots and blueberries, cashews and hazelnuts, brown rice syrup and oats.

Even Stonyfield Farm, an organic pioneer in the United States, is pursuing a foreign supplier; Stonyfield is working on a deal to import milk powder from New Zealand.

"I'm not suggesting we would be importing from all these places," said Gary Hirshberg, president and CEO of Stonyfield Farm Inc. "But for transition purposes, to help organic supply to keep up with the nation's growing hunger, these countries have to be considered."

The dilemma of how to fill the gap between organic supply and demand is part of a long-running debate within America's booming organic industry. For many enthusiasts, organic is about more than the food on their plates; it's a way to improve the environment where they live and help keep small-scale farmers in business.

"If organic is something created in the image of sustainable agriculture, we certainly haven't accomplished that yet," said Urvashi Rangan, a scientist for Consumers Union. "What people do have to understand is if that stuff comes in from overseas, and it's got an organic label on it, it had to meet USDA standards in order to get here."

"I don't like the idea of it coming in from out of this country, but I don't want them to stop growing organic because of that," Forgues said. "I want people to say, `Let's do that here, give a farmer another avenue to make a livable wage.'"

Switching to organic is a difficult proposition. Vegetable grower Scott Woodard is learning through trial and error on his Putnam Valley, N.Y., farm. One costly mistake: Conventional farmers can plant seeds when they want and use pesticides to kill hungry insect larvae. If Woodard had waited three weeks to plant, the bugs that ate his seeds would have hatched and left. Organic seeds can be double the price of conventional.

"There's not a lot of information out there," Woodard said. "We try to do the best we can. Sometimes it's too late, but then we learn for next time."

Stonyfield and Organic Valley are working to increase the number of organic farms, paying farmers to help them switch or boost production. Stonyfield, together with farmer-owned cooperative Organic Valley, expects to spend around $2 million on incentives and technical help in 2006, Hirshberg said.

Other companies offer similar help. And the industry's Organic Trade Association is trying to become more of a resource for individual farmers.

Caren Wilcox, the group's executive director, described how an Illinois farmer showed up in May at an industry show in Chicago.

"He said, `I want to get certified. Help me,'" Wilcox said. "It was a smart thing to do, but the fact that he had to get into his car and go down to McCormick Center says something about the availability of information."

In the meantime, manufacturers like Clif Bar and Stonyfield still prefer to buy organic ingredients, wherever they come from, instead of conventional crops in the U.S.

"Anybody who's helping to take toxins out of the biosphere and use less poisonous chemicals in agriculture is a hero of mine," Hirshberg said. "There's enormous opportunity here for everybody to win, large and small."

About Me

A very down to earth* kind of guy. I'm an environmental sociologist interested in establishing material and organizational sustainability worldwide. I'm always looking for interesting materials/technologies, inspiring ideas, or institutional examples of sustainability to inspire others to recognize their choices now. To be fatalistic about an unsustainable world is a sign of a captive mind, given all our options.
*(If "earth" is defined in a planetary sense, concerning comparative historical knowledge and interest in the past 10,000 years or so anywhere...) See both blogs.